Halford Mackinder began his sketch on a spare map in 1904 by putting his pencil down on a point near the seas north of Russia’s St. Petersburg, by the Kanin Peninsula. From there, he laid down a southward graphite trail, bending west to incorporate Moscow, then heading south once more, threading between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea until he stopped barely above the Persian Gulf.
When Black Lives Matter protesters toppled a bronze statue of 17th-century British philanthropist, politician and slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol on Sunday, many cheered. Even the mayor of the city acknowledged that he had never liked its prominent placement, which he called "an affront."
The coronavirus pandemic is not, by the standards of the great plagues of the past, a particularly deadly disease. The plague that struck the Athens of Pericles seems to have had a much higher mortality rate, though its geographical reach was restricted. The epidemic that wrecked the Emperor Justinian’s drive to re-establish imperial authority in the west was similarly responsible for more death than the current outbreak – so far.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991 is still portrayed as a collection of simplistic clichés (1). British political analyst Timothy Garton Ash says that ‘in 1989 Europeans proposed a new model of non-violent, velvet revolution’ (2), a reverse image of that of the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917.
D-Day was the largest amphibious invasion in history since King Xerxes’ 480 bc combined sea and land descent into Greece. The Americans, especially General George Marshall, had wanted to invade France as early as spring 1943, still confident from their World War I experience that they could land easily in France and within a year push back the German army to end the war. The British and their Dominions, mindful of disasters from the Somme to Dunkirk and Dieppe, were reluctant to land in France even in 1944.
There have been roughly one thousand biographies of Winston Churchill – that’s about one for every page of Andrew Roberts’ extraordinary single-volume doorstopper. Churchill himself was a prolific writer, publishing millions of words, often about his endeavours, during his lifetime. The question may be if we needed any further commentary on the UK’s greatest wartime leader and best-loved historical figures.
When Boris Johnson became the editor of The Spectator in 1999, he declared that he planned to make the weekly magazine, Britain’s oldest, a “refuge for logic, fun, and good writing.” It would, he promised somewhat paradoxically, “continue to set the political agenda, and to debunk it.”
